Steve Plotnicki

I didn't really bite at Fat Guy's "lack of concept" point, but since Suzanne sussed it out to such an extent I might as well. I disagree wholeheartedly with you guys. I think every restaurant makes some type of statement. And the succesful ones make a concise statement that is coherent and has meaning to people. I don't think I ever sit down in a restaurant where I don't ask the questions of, what is this derivitive of, where did the chef source his inspiration, and what is it that he is trying to say about the food and the way we eat it? In fact the thing that most often turns me off a place is their lack of an interesting message. Just read my initial reviews of Craft if you want to see a good example of a diner being confused about what a restaurant is trying to say, and how my opinion of it changed when it was presented to me in a different form. You see I don't think that restaurants are much different then other items where creativity and fashion come into play. There will always be people who are eager to experience a variation on a black cocktail dress, or a nice sofa, or a plate of mashed potatoes. Those are all things that get improved with time (which is what makes them timeless .) And if you are a fan of fasihon, furniture or cooking and understand their evolution, I don't see how you experience those things without seeing them as part of a long line of creativity? In fact what restaurant doesn't make a statement? Even if it's a small, superficial and ineffectual one?

Tony - You're the punter who looks at the one example in thousands that breaks the mold and then points to it as proof. If the various media and fashion businesses relied on "accidents" to run their businsses they would be out of business faster then you could say their names. Your argument is really the typical one that people who "can't pick the hits" use to explain their inability to do so. And as someone who works in the media industry and sees how these choices are made, I don't understand what the big deal is with admitting that there are certain people who are gifted at these things, and that those people shape taste and the market. And even more so, they are responsible for some percentage of taste shaping that is probably in excess of 90% of the successes that occur. Did it ever occur to you that while that might be the case (they have a high success rate,) you insist on pointing to the ones that fall between the cracks? That all makes for good copy for the afternoon dailies so the punters feel better about themselves. But all it proves is that the "elite" isn't infallable. It doesn't prove they don't exist.

Well that is why I was so skeptical. I know the meat must cost at least half of that or more. But then again I thought they had their system down pat. Maybe they don't pay any rent and Fairway looks at it as a loss leader to get people into the store.

There is hardly an announcement that involves steaks where Mrs. P and I don't take notice. Oh we pay no attention to those announcements from out of town steakhouses. Like who cared when they announced that Ruth's Chris was going to open (if I open a steak house I will be sure to call it "Lillie's Steve.") But an announcement that Fairway was going to have a steakhouse at night seemed to be the real deal New York City thing going on. And since the blurb in the Times said it was okay to BYO, how could we pass this up? So since I am leaving in the morning for a continent with a greater tradition of dining then my native one, what could be a better sendoff then the thing we do best here, a nice big, fat, juicy steak. I have to tell you I'm not a Fairway person. Everytime I've ever gone into Fairway people seem to be either pushing each other out of the way, and/ or they are screaming at each other. I prefer a slightly more pristine shopping environment and it probably has been at least ten years since I've been inside. So I was a little apprehensive about our visit. But fortunately within five feet of entering the store there was a sign hanging from the ceiling that said "Now Open, Mitchel London Steakhouse, blah, blah blah." Of course this didn't help us much as it didn't say where in the store it was. So Mrs. P and I started to prowl around figuring we'd find it. "Where's the butcher Mrs. P said (now she's a sharp one eh?) Our confusion was further complicated by our finding a new sign about 20 feet from the old one that said, "Opening Soon, Mitchel London Steakhouse." Uh oh. So we decided to ask someone and we found a guy who was stamping the price onto cans of something. But he didn't know what we were talking about. So we split up. Finally after about 3 or 4 minutes of working the aisles while I both searched for the secret entrance to the steakhouse and avoided shopping carts being pushed by old ladies whose style of grocery shopping is to walk in exactly the center of the aisle at a pace that would make a slug seem like it was sprinting, I miraculously ran into Mrs. P who when she saw me, pointed up a flight of stairs near the front of the store. Aha, Fairway has a cafe. Who knew? But this cloud had a silver lining because when we got to the top of the stairs and walked into the cafe, there lay a display case with gorgeous cuts of meat inside. NY Strips, Ribeye, giant Filet Mignon and double cut Lamb Chops. And next to the display case lay some pretty fine looking side dishes. We entered the room which was decorated in a style I can describe as "faux warehouse." Kind of like what the stockroom at Pathmark must look like but this had some gift baskets and other tchochke strewn about. The room has about fifteen tables that were well spread apart. They sat us at a table for four and they took our wine away. A few minutes later the waiter returned with the wine having been opened and two water glasses. "Don't you have any wine glasses I asked?" No, we use these glasses for wine, and he began to pour my 1990 Paul Avril Clos des Papes into a water glass. Alrighty. But we were troopers and we both ordered salads (caeser for me and iceberg with blue cheese for Mrs. P,) NY Strips rare and side dishes. I have to admit I was a bit skeptical. The way they work it, it's a price fixed $35 a person for the salad, steak, and side dishes of mashed potatoes, sauteed mushrooms and creamed spinach. They also offer a series of additional side dishes like potato gratin, parsnip puree etc. for $4 an order. Could this be real? Could they deliver a top notch steak at that price? After we placed our order, Mitchel London himself came over to our table to schmooze with us. "What did you order? Strips, rare, ceaser iceberg? Good, good." I asked him what was up with there being no wine glasses? "It's under discussion?" he replied. Discussion with who I pressed? "My wife" and he laughed. Let's skip past the salads which were fine but ordinary and get to the main attraction. Other then the fact that I like my meat a bit dry aged, and these were on the fresh side, the steak was terrific. It was a juicy hunk of meat that must have been a few inches thick. It had an even char crust that did not extend much beyond the surface, and it was dotted with threads of marbled fat throughout the steak. You could have cut it with a butter knife. They served it with a beautiful plate of mixed mushrooms that were showered with chopped garlic, a large portion of creamy and slightly cheesie potato gratin and a healthy size portion of home style creamed spinach. Home meaning the spinach wasn't completely moist and soft. It was chopped in a course manner and it was slightly undercooked. The steaks were so big that both Mrs. P and I couldn't finish them. But we did have room for a plate for Haagen Das vanilla ice cream with some homemade caramel sauce. And the grand total for all of this was $76.00. What an unbelievable bargain. So if you don't mind eating in a warehouse environment without much decor, sitting on metal chairs that are both cold and hard, and drinking your wine from water glasses (at least until they get them,) Mitchel London steakhouse is for you. But I guess that describes me as well because as we left to say goodbye to Mitchel, we told him we'll be back. And we meant it.

I can tell the difference between the woods, but not really. I don't have smoked meats on a regular enough basis to be served a plate of Q and say "oak!" But I bet if ribs which were smoked using different types of woods were places side by side, I would be able to tell which is which. This ability comes from using wood chips on a regular basis on my Weber grill. Hickory in particular has a unique smell that is sort of maple syrupish. Applewood and Cherrywood smell sweet. Mesquite is fairly unique and is coarse, and oak hardly flavors the food. Oak is more for grilling over oak logs (think Hitching Post.) As for BS, I didn't say the food wasn't smoked at all. It was. But it was about 20% short for my taste and knowledge of Q.

Said with the conviction of a man who doesn't know how to pick hits. Colonal Parker wasn't someone who picked talent, he was a personal manager. That he only picked one artist is proof of nothing. He happened to pick the biggest artist of all time so there was no need for him to pick anyone else. But I wonder how you explain how there are people who work for recording companies that choose hit artist after hit artist for decades? Or radio station programers who do the same with records that become hits? Or how certain producers, directors and actors end up usually working on hit movies? Or how certain fashion magazines happen to feature the clothing that becomes fashionable and trendy? Or how there are certain editors at publishing companies who on a regular basis choose to work with authors that write hit or important books? Do you think it's all luck, merchandising and vested interests? Or do you think that possibly that the reason people do these things for a living is they are good at it? If you worked in any of the entertainment industries, including the fashion industry, you would find that a remarkably small group of people are responsible for shaping taste. You just happened to pick three names of artists who have no ties to each other because they recorded for different labels and had different managers. But if you were to look inside a single label, you would be surprised at how few people do things that make a big impact. But you don't really want it to be that way, even if it's true. God forbid that the ability to be good at something and make money at it was something more then luck. How would the people who weren't "lucky" feel if they had to admit the truth about it?

Craft isn't a Meyer restaurant. Yes I do think they are all watered down and I thought I said that (or at least implied it) in my prior post. Of course the fact they they offer diners a user friendly approach to upper middle dining doesn't mean you can't eat well at the restaurants. In fact I have had excellent meals at all of them. It's just that I see the food as not swinging for the fences so that they make sure everyone "gets it." Lots of singles and doubles on the menus with an occassional stroke of brilliance like Eleven Mad's flan (it's some green veggie I forget) or Gramercy's roast pork belly. If you have never been to Craft I think you would like it (in fact I was there last night.) It's sort of an extension of the Italian way of doing things applied to an American style menu. Even the raw fish course strikes me as more Italian then Japanese or South American as the thin slices are lightly dressed and showered with some type of chopped of shredded vegetable. Fat guy - The way you would dumb down Q is to lower the amount of smoke in your end product and to use overly lean meat. This isn't only a BS phenomenon. The ribs I had flown in from the Salt Lick in Austin were lightly smoked compared to what I've had in the past. But they met what I think is an acceptable level of smokiness so they therefore were deemed delicious by Plotnicki. These fell short although as you pointed out, they are clearly the meatiest and most tender ribs I've ever had.

Well I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised that BS might not be serving Q at the same intensity as "real" Q places. Places like the original Pearson's blow the place out of the water. Across the board, the theme at DM restaurants seems to be to water down the product to make it more accessable to a larger marketplace. But when it's in the upscale places, you can look at it as an affectation. Like they printed the menu in large letters so people who aren't used to eating at that level can see the menu better. But when you apply that strategy to street food, it can make things pretty bland.Go to the hot dog stand in Madison Square Park. A more goyische, not from New York hot dog with toppings worthy of a farmer from Nebraska you have never seen this side of the Hudson. In fact, in my Rabbi's sermon on shabbas he mentioned it in the same sentence as ham. So when I went to BS, I was preparing myself for some dilution of real Q. But this went slightly beyond the pale. Like FG said (and I did originally as well,) the quality of the meat is a big improvement. But the lack of smoke nullifies that improvement. Hopefully DM won't open a kosher style deli as I'm sure the pastrami will taste like Oscar Meyer bologna.

Macrosan - The whole thing is about the equipment. The smoky taste comes from the length of time the meat is exposed to the smoke, and what type of wood they use.

I'd be happy with less then real, but good barbecue. But the smoke to meat ratio has to resemble barbecue. The fact that they use better quality meat that is tender is a big improvement. But that is more then offset by the lack of smokiness. I will return to try the smoked foie and brisket. But I have to admit I am starting out as a doubter.

You don't have to be seated at the Kaiseki bar but it helps if you are the interested type. It gives you a chance to talk to the chef about what he has served you. But sitting at a table is fine. Gee I haven't been since before the summer. I have to go for the holidays.

While watching the Rangers stink at home for yet another game, I was wondering where to get a quick bite afte the game was over. I didn't want to stray too far (that means within a 15 block radius) and I didn't want it to be a big deal. And since I was with a "wine friend," the place had to have a reasonable list of wine. As we walked down Seventh Avenue, freezing in our state of semi-disgust I asked, "hey, how about some about barbecue." It was that easy and away we went in a taxi. This was going to be my first time at Blue Smoke. When the place first opened it was so jammed, and I didn't want to wait on line for two hours. So I sort of forgot about it. The first thing that struck me about Blue Smoke was how large the place was. From reading the reviews and reports, I got the impression that it was a more intimate and discriminating type of BBQ place. How surprised was I when we walked into an upscale version of Virgil's BBQ. Actually, the place is about the same level of decor as a place like the East Coast Grill in Boston. One or two levels above a theme restaurant. And I was also surprised to see that the place was so busy. I would say that when they sat us (9:30pm), there were only 3 or 4 available tables and the bar was packed with people watching the World Series. Before they opened, I remember reading an artcicle where Danny Meyer (one of the owners of Blue Smoke) tasted wines with BBQ to see what matched well. Accordng to Danny, the grand winner was champagne. So I wasn't surprised when the wine list started out with a few selections of good champagne by the glass. I settled in with a glass of Billecourt Salmon Brut Rose and my dining companion ordered a 2000 Huet Vouvray Clos de Bourg.. We flipped the menu over (you know you're dealing with wine people when they read the wine list first,) asked the waitress for a description of the various styles of ribs (there are three different types,) and decided the only sensible thing to do was to order the rib sampler which had all three types. We put our order in along with some sweet potato fries, crispy potato chips and creamed spinach. About 20 minutes later our ribs and sides showed up. When they place it down in front of me, I asked the waitress if there was a certain order they recommend eating them in. She looked at me in a puzzled way and said "what do you mean?" I said you know like when you get a cheese sampler, they recommend you eat them in a certain order. She said, "that's right, they do do that with a cheese plate don't they?" She then went on to say that there is no special way to eat the ribs. Just dig in. Oh well. I have to say that these ribs were about the meatiest ribs I ever had. Both the St. Louis and the Texas ribs were about as meaty as I've ever seen rins come off a rack. And good quality meat too. The Babybacks were a less impressive piece of meat. Not much different from what I remember getting from Bobby Rubino's back in the day. But the taste of barbecue, where was it? There was none. The meat tasted good but where the hell was the taste of smoked meat? Did they smoke these things? It was the plainest and blandest barbecue I had ever tasted. What tasted great in the first few bites melted into eating the equivelent of grilled ribs that weren't even basted in a good BBQ sauce. The sides fare no better. They didn't exactly possess lots of flavor. Our conversation, which was sort of perky because we were excited to eat Q, fell to a hush while we both knew that we were in bland land. And while my glass of champagne was good on its own, we were both trying to figure out what made it go well with champagne? Chalk another one off the list. Why places like this are popular beats me. Haven't the people ever tasted real barbecue before?

Cabrales - Are you trying to say that you pursue the hobby of three star dining in spite of your subjective preferences?

Macrosan - You are 10,000% wrong. Very few items make it to market without the described elite endorsing it. And of the items that do, just a small percentage of them "make it." This is why there are people who are professionals in their field, and who get paid to make these choices for a living. And there is also a collector or hobbyist level of people who are expert at it. I don't know what to tell you about the world of "fashionable things" that rely on underlying substance to make them work. Certain people are good at "picking the hits" and that includes things that are fashionable for the moment and things that will be deemed important long term. And if nothing more, the level of your protestation will identify you to not be among that group of people . Price and fashionalbility are affectations that you have to look behind in order to see the substance of things. It's like judging a book by its cover. One has to assess why they became fashionable in the first instance. Because as I have said (and which nobody has refuted,) the first person who deems something "special" does so without the knowledge of how the market will react to it. They endorse something based on their own expertise and ability to discern things that are interesting and new, even if they restate something old in a new and fresh way.

Oraklet - "Crap" becomes fashionable because the thing that makes it popular appeals to a short term need of the market, as opposed to it having long term substance. But in reality the question is a bit of a non-starter because we are discussing controlled markets (high end) for food, fashion and design and the mass market is excluded from them based on price. But let me give you an example of a mass market item that isn't crap. Phiipe Stark furniture for Target (chain of U.S. department stores.) The furniture has a level of design to it that you don't usually get from a department store item and as such, the cognascenti in places like South Beach went out and bought it as "functional" everyday furniture for their apartments. But you can't seperate the level of the design from the function which is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. But on the otherhand, the Philip Stark Lagioule steak knife stands a lesser chance of becoming a "classic." It sort of looks like an oddity, and doesn't really add anything to the original. And as such I've never seen them in anyone's home, just in a few restaurants that wanted to appear trendy. Macrosan - You are talking about the market at the point where goods or services are already popular. What you aren't addressing is how a bottle of Petrus was deemed to be worth that much money in the first place. At some point in time the first bottle of Petrus appeared. When that happened, all the winemaker had to say about it was a story of where the grapes were grown, what method they were raised with, and how the wine was vinified. But when they decided to price Petrus at four times the cost of Mouton, someone had to taste the wine and say it was worth it based on noticing that the technique applied got a special result. Without that tier of people, the bill at the restaurant Petrus never happens. How would those diners know about it if the first tier of appraisers (the press, wholesalers etc.) didn't qualify it as being extra special? Of course this doesn't mean that there aren't items that are expensive and highly sought after that aren't crap. Of course there are. But over time you will see that their popularity fades and those items that have substance to them last. Look at Louis Vuitton luggage. You can look at it as fashionable crap. But then you can go to a design musem and see the beautiful steamer trunks that LV made at the time that sea travel was fashionable. Mens and womens wardrobes or writing desks that open up out of trunks. That is the foundation their brand is built on and without it, the handbags with their logos never would have happened.

What flaws? If "hits" are fashionable, and there are a group of people who can "pick the hits" 80% of the time on first blush, what flaws are there with the theory? Remember the original proffer, that things are popular because they are fashionable and not because they are new expressions of technique that are recognized. But that raises the question of how they can be fashionable before anyone else is liking it or doing it? "Fashionable" is a historical term. It describes someone who already made the right choice. How do you describe the person who has no external reference point as to how to make the right choices yet does so a signficant percentage of the time? The "elite" make their choices exactly the way the original proffer states. They recognize technical advancement or interesting application of existing technique. Because when they do so, clearly they can't rely on what is fashionable. It doesn't exist yet. It can only be fashionable after anywhere from one, to a larger group of people are doing it or make a certain choice. And it is irrelevent as to whether in the long term those choices turn out to have lasting merit, or turn out to be popular but crap. Those things are discreet from noticing technical advancement/application. Lasting merit is a historical perspective that extends beyond the fashionability phase. Which only occurs after someone has noticed the technical advancement phase. And if I can apply this to restaurant criticism. 1. L'Astrance opens 2. Reviewers and discerning diners who make it their business to eat at new places point out technical advancement/interesting technical application 3. A second and third rung of diners go and a larger body of public opinion forms 4. There is a groundswell of positive opinion and interest grows 5. Reservations become difficult, or nearly impossible to get 6. Word of mouth filters down to people who live in New Jersey and Kentucky and now reservations are absolutely impossible to get. Like The French Laundry getting 400 calls a day for 17 tables. I bet you that 90% of those 400 people do not regularly eat in haute cuisine type places yet they "have to go" to the FL. Would they if the "elite" didn't speak of it a certain way? This pattern I've described happens time and time again with restaurants. It has nothing to do with anyone making a statement about themselves. That's because the chef has already made whatever statement needs to be made about his diners when he creates the cuisine. Their only role is to recognize it. But the whole thing relies on it being some sort of advancement in the first place. Because if it wasn't a technical advancement of some sort, and it wasn't noticed by a person with the skill to notice these things before they become trendy, it wouldn't become the trendy thing to do.

Robert Schonfeld = Chief Italian Cuisine Apologist Well I am going to try and eat at that place in Torino next week if I can figure out the name of the restaurant. Otherwise I agree with you. But you have to admit that if there is interesting cooking hdiding out in the Italian provinces, the reason it is going unnoticed is because past attempts at doing something interesting wern't tremendously successful. Also, the ecnomic and cultural centers of the country didn't create the equivelent of the type of high end, hybrid of dufferent region cuisine that you see in Paris. They cook regional even in those places.

But that is the ultimate in Plotnickiism. Prior to things becoming fashionable, a group of people evaluate it based on a disinterested analysis of technique. It doesn't become fashionable until they deem the technique worthy. It is only then that a rung of people who are interested, but less so then the first tier sample it. And then it trickles outward from there like waves. When I first started in the music biz I worked in a record shop (they called them records back then.) And one of my jobs was to man a counter where they sold 7" singles. It was a fascinating job because I learned that as a single made its way up the charts, the quality of the buyers diminished. By that I mean that in the first three weeks after a song was released, the most serious collectors would be the purchasers. But starting in week four, a second wave of not quite as serious collector would ask for the song and that would go on for three weeks. That sequence would happen between three and six times. And depending on the life expectancy of a recording, and how mainstream it got, you would have people buying the new Barbara Streisand or Bon Jovi single between 12-18 weeks after release. And those buyers were what I would characterize as "poor quality buyers" because they bought recordings infrequently. For them to buy something they had to be deluged with the song on the radio. But there is an interesting internal phenomenon that takes place among the groups. Starting with the first group, if they don't bite, the second group won't appear. Same with the dynamic between the second and the third group and so on. I learned retaltively quickly in my career, each group was dependant on the other for their "taste." But it was really the very first group that set the standards of taste. If one were to overlay this concept onto food, the proliferation of dishes like cassoulet have gone through a similar metamporphasis. They start with a simple bistro in Paris. But eventually they end up at the French equivelent of the Olive Garden (I know there isn't one but you get my point.) People who eat at the Olive Garden are the lowest common denominator diners. And by that I mean, they are the very last to hear about what is good and what is new in Italian food. If you look at Heston's answer about his friend with the scuba diving mask, if for some reason that became popular, it wouldn't hit the Olive Garden for another 20 years. These things move slowly. Of course unless it is something with a limited audience like the proliferation of white truffles and their oil. That's why when you say "an intrictate set of social beliefs," I think that only becomes an issue when something is becoming popularized. And I think before that happens it is recognized for being a great technical achievement in the first place. Thos who are willing to annoint potato foam to be as good as mashed potatoes, analyze things outside of the context of popularity. There is no mass audience to test it against. But I have to say that in my experience, people who are expert on that level have an amazingly high hit to miss ratio. And if I can go back to my record store example and 7" sales, it isn't that every recording the people in the first three weeks would buy would become a hit, it's that they hardly ever missed a hit. And I would probably say that they bought upwards of 80% of the songs that became hits, or became well known for some other reason that had nothing to do with being played on the radio.

For those who didn't see Heston Blumenthal's excellent answer in regards to this question, I am posting a link to that thread. Modern Italian cuisine I thought he did a good job of hitting the nail on the head. And I'm looking forward to going to Torino to eat with a scuba diving mask. Fortunately for me, I am going to be in Torino next week and I will try to get there.

Korova (or is it Korovo) is the restaurant Herme's wife runs on rue Marbeuf. There is a small Pierre Herme shop at the front of the store. It's a weird, if not fun place to have lunch.

As I do not want to plagerize his work, I direct you to issue # 61 of the Art of Eating by Ed Behr. Now we can get back to the topic at hand.

Of course there is there just isn't any taste to it . (Oh that felt good )

But all art tells us something about ourselves. It's just that high art doesn't compromise itself with marketability, and more consumable items (like food, clothing and furniture) depend on their likeability/functionality to work well and to be appealing. I am struck by how easily we characterize an affluent meal as a statement that says I am of the cognascenti. As opposed to a statement that says that people (all of them) are entitled to live this well. I don't find much difference between French Provinical/Jewish food/Italian home cooking, and other types of cuisine where stewing or braising is the technique at the heart of the cuisine. I think those "comfort foods" are soulful. And I think there is some metaphor with one's life being long and slow, and becoming mijote or gedempt with time. I think the Chinese have this same soulfulness but coming from a different direction. As do the Moroccans and the Mexicans. A good subthread for this thread is why does what we consider "soulfood" move us to the extent it does? And it is also in that light one has to ask why British cuisine lacks so many of the elements that would make it soulful? A description I might add that can be applied to the U.S. and the rest of Europe north of Belgium. Looking at it simply, is it just a matter of broth from chickens or meat?

I feel confident that this is one time where ignorance is bliss .

I thought his description of British restaurants was just fine . Wilfrid - Actually there is some talk about what a restaurant stands for on some of the French threads. Read the threads that discuss El Bulli and you will see that part of the conversation is whether the style will gain wide acceptance with so much of the focus being shifted to what the chef does, and less on what makes the diner happy. As to your Burberry raincoat example, you have brought up what it means as a fashion statement. Before you get to that, before it was fashionable it was merely a design that was appealing to people, i.e., designed better, i.e., better technique applied. That it was eventually marketed as a symbol of affluence and stability doesn't diminish from the fact that at one time, it stood out from a massive number of raincoats it was in competition with because it balanced function and style better then the competition did.